---
title: 'Strategic Deals Lead at Generalist'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-deals-lead-generalist-san-mateo-0rmkzfk4tqkx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-16'
---

# Strategic Deals Lead at Generalist

- **Company:** Generalist
- **Location:** San Mateo, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist/6670d05f-3792-4a04-82b6-a8d94b3ad809

## Job description

## About Generalist

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done. We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world. The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models https://research.google/blog/palm-e-an-embodied-multimodal-language-model/ [RT-2](https://deepmind.google/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action/), [Gemini Robotics](https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/)), launched and scaled [ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/) and [GPT-4](https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/) to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots ([Atlas](https://bostondynamics.com/atlas/), [Spot](https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/), [Stretch](https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/)) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from [parkour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk) to [manipulation](https://bostondynamics.com/blog/large-behavior-models-atlas-find-new-footing/), and [testing robustness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuA50H9uek)). We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Generalist is looking for a Strategic Deals Lead to own the structuring, negotiation, and expansion of our most important commercial and strategic relationships. As we bring frontier robotics technology into the real world, many of our partnerships do not fit neatly into standard software or commercial agreements. They involve new technologies, evolving business models, complex technical and legal considerations, and counterparties ranging from large global enterprises to robotics and technology partners. You will be part of our Applied AI & Partnerships team, working closely with technical and executive leadership to turn strategic relationships into durable, scalable commercial agreements. You should be equally comfortable designing a creative deal structure, negotiating with a senior business executive, working through a difficult contractual issue, and getting deep enough into our technology to understand what the agreement needs to protect and enable.

## Responsibilities

- Strategic deal ownership: Own the structuring, negotiation, and closing of Generalist’s most complex and strategically important commercial transactions and partnerships, from initial terms through definitive agreements, renewals, and expansions.
- Commercial structuring: Develop creative deal structures for emerging technologies and business models, balancing strategic value, economics, technical feasibility, customer needs, and long-term company interests.
- Negotiation & legal terms: Lead commercial negotiations and partner closely with legal counsel on complex contractual issues, including training data and data-use rights, model and fine-tune rights, intellectual property, exclusivity, deployment, and other emerging AI and robotics concepts.
- Technical & cross-functional partnership: Work closely with Applied AI & Partnerships, company leadership, and technical teams to understand the technology and translate product, model, data, and deployment requirements into appropriate deal structures and commitments.
- Renewals & expansion: Drive the commercial strategy for major partnership renewals and expansions, identifying opportunities to deepen relationships and increase their long-term value.
- Deal strategy & playbooks: Synthesize learnings from transactions into clear recommendations for leadership, including reusable negotiation positions, deal frameworks, market intelligence, and implications for future commercial strategy.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Demonstrated track record of independently structuring, negotiating, and closing complex, high-value technology transactions or strategic partnerships.
- Significant experience negotiating agreements involving novel technologies, non-standard commercial structures, or complex intellectual property and data considerations.
- Strong commercial judgment and the ability to distinguish between issues that are strategically critical and those where creative compromise is possible.
- Ability to understand sophisticated legal concepts, work closely with technical teams and translate complex engineering and product concepts into commercial structures, contractual requirements, and strategic recommendations.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to distill complex negotiations into clear decisions and recommendations for senior leadership.
- Ability to operate effectively under pressure, build alignment among stakeholders with competing objectives, and know when to challenge, escalate, develop alternatives, or close.
- Comfort operating in a fast-changing environment where priorities, processes, and responsibilities may sometimes be ambiguous and evolve quickly.

## Preferred Qualifications

- 8–10+ years of experience in strategic deals, corporate development, strategic partnerships, business development, technology transactions, or a related field, with meaningful direct transactional ownership.
- Experience negotiating transactions involving AI, machine learning, robotics, enterprise software, data licensing, intellectual property, or other technically complex products.
- Experience owning renewals and expansions of large strategic or enterprise. relationships.
- Experience working in an environment where the product, business model, and market structure are still evolving.
- JD preferred.
- Experience managing multiple high-value transactions simultaneously at different stages of maturity and commercial development.

## About Generalist

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Generalist is a frontier AI research and product company building general-purpose intelligence for the physical world through embodied foundation models for robots.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Mateo, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Pete Florence (Co-Founder & CEO), Andy Zeng (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Embodied AI
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises operating factories, warehouses, laboratories, restaurants, and logistics centers; eventually homes.
- **Mission**: “Make general-purpose robots a reality. We build embodied foundation models for the physical world.”

## Products & Services
- **GEN-1**: General-purpose AI model for robotics that achieves ~99% average success rate on tasks (vs. 64% for prior state-of-the-art) and completes tasks roughly 3x faster. Trained on half a million hours of real-world data collected via low-cost wearable devices. Available to early-access partners as a model or API. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)
- **GEN-0**: Previous generation model that demonstrated scaling laws in robotics. Used as the foundation for GEN-1.
- **Data Collection Devices**: Proprietary low-cost wearable hardware that captures human activities at scale, enabling pretraining without large teleoperation or simulation datasets.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $128M (Series A closed March 2025; earlier seed round led by NVentures) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: NVentures (seed lead); Board Director Ellen Chisa. Series A investor not named in public data.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 325% YoY to 42 employees. GEN-1 model released five months after GEN-0, with production-level reliability. Early-access partnerships underway. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Model performance**: GEN-1 achieves 99% average success rate across tasks like kitting auto parts, folding T-shirts, packing phones – a step change from sub-70% success by previous models.
- **Data efficiency**: Trained primarily on human demonstration data (wearable devices) rather than expensive robot teleoperation data; can match previous models with 10x less task-specific data.
- **Algorithmic innovations**: Custom training kernels, paged attention for real-time inference, Harmonic Reasoning, and RL post-training enable improvisation and recovery from unexpected scenarios.
- **Team pedigree**: Founders and key hires from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Boston Dynamics – bringing experience from ChatGPT, GPT-4, PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics, Atlas, Spot, and Stretch.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities: Scale GEN-1’s embodied foundation model to master more complex physical tasks, expand into economically valuable settings (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare), and build the data infrastructure needed for general-purpose robots. The company is “accelerating the next phase of factories, homes, and the broader physical world.”

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Tight-knit, research-forward environment with a mix of AI and hardware engineering. On-site presence in San Francisco (SFO) and Boston (BOS). [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: All open positions are listed as “On-site” (no remote or hybrid options).
- **Notable Perks**: Not explicitly disclosed, but the startup’s rapid growth and $128M funding suggest competitive compensation and equity. The team consists of leading roboticists and AI researchers, offering exposure to cutting-edge work.
- **Engineering Culture**: Heavy emphasis on technical staff (Software Engineers in ML Infra, Robotics Controls, ML Optimization, Infrastructure; Research Scientists in pretraining and post-training). Roles include hands-on robot operation and systems building.

## Sources
1. [generalistai.com](https://generalistai.com/)
2. [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
3. [generalistai.com/about](https://generalistai.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
5. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)

## Other roles at Generalist

- [Partnerships Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-generalist-boston-8nybcad5s025) — Boston, MA
- [Partnerships Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-associate-generalist-san-mateo-6tjbtw8vd9hs) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Senior Legal Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-legal-counsel-generalist-san-mateo-t600f8nkb79n) — San Mateo, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-generalist-san-mateo-c8zkjanpaav9) — San Mateo, CA
- [Talent Acquisition Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-acquisition-partner-generalist-san-mateo-ky6enky5hd1r) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Scientist: Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-post-training-generalist-san-mateo-vrnttp54gr4z) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Data Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/data-partnerships-generalist-san-mateo-tm0yccvmgxm3) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-generalist-boston-74p3xtqpvs13) — Boston, MA
- [Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-generalist-san-mateo-x985d69q4w17) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/research-assistant-generalist-san-mateo-1ahfzy22gp7s) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA